The Mirror and the Light: 2020’s highly anticipated conclusion to the best selling, award winning Wolf Hall series (The Wolf Hall Trilogy, Book 3)

by Hilary Mantel

  ‘Well, not today,’ Gardiner says.

  Three o’clock: piss break. Origen cited, St Jerome, Chrysostom, the prophet Isaiah. Outside, Gardiner says, ‘I cannot think why the old charges against Lambert were ever dropped. A change of archbishop is no excuse. You should have been on top of that, Cromwell.’

  Stokesley says, ‘You don’t seem to be taking much interest in the case, my lord Privy Seal.’

  ‘I wonder why,’ Gardiner says. He spies Latimer. ‘What about you, are you profiting from the king’s learning?’

  Hugh growls like a terrier before a bull.

  It takes some time for all the spectators to file to their places, to cease coughing and settle. Then all eyes turn to him, the king’s Vicegerent. He lurches to his feet. ‘Majesty, having heard your reasoning, and that of the bishops, I have nothing to add, and I do not think anything is wanting.’

  ‘What?’ Gardiner says behind him. ‘Nothing is wanting? Go on, Cromwell, reason on the case. You think no one wants to hear you? I want to hear you.’

  The king glares. Gardiner throws up his hands, as if in apology.

  It is Lambert’s turn to speak. And turns are observed – except by Stephen. Lambert has negotiated himself from his knees to his feet, but four hours have gone by and nobody has offered him a chair. Twilight: his shoulders sag. The torches come in. As their light plays over the faces of the bishops, the king says, ‘It is time, Lambert. You have heard all these learned men. So now, what do you think? Have we persuaded you? Will you live or die?’

  Lambert says, ‘I commend my soul into God’s hands. My body, into your Majesty’s. I submit to your judgement. I rest in your clemency.’

  Don’t, he thinks. Not there.

  Henry says, ‘You hold the sacrament of the altar to be a puppet show.’

  ‘No,’ Lambert says.

  The king holds up a hand. ‘You say it is an illusion. That it is an image only, or figure. You are confounded by one text, the words of Jesus: Hoc est corpus meum. It is the plainest text of all. I will not be a patron to heretics. My lord Cromwell, read the sentence against this man.’

  He picks up the documents. In such cases they are prepared in advance. Stokesley says he alone has burned fifty heretics, and even if he is just bragging, there is a form for the next part of the procedure that is well-rehearsed. He stands.

  ‘Give it good and loud,’ Stokesley says. ‘Let us hear you at last, my lord Cromwell. Leave the wretch in no doubt as to his fate.’

  After the edict is read, the guards take Lambert out. The king inclines his head to his audience, with the sober piety of a churchman: which, for this afternoon, he has been. When he lifts his chin, his expression is exalted.

  At a signal, the trumpeters step into the hall. They blow a fanfare to see the king out. Six trumpeters. Sixteen pence each. Eight shillings for the treasury to find. The king is thinking of forming a new guard, called the Gentlemen Spears, with new livery. The way he’s going, he’ll want trumpeters every hour.

  Barely six o’clock, but black night outside. The winter has taken its iron grip. ‘That was grim,’ Rafe says.

  He agrees. ‘Poor fellow.’

  Rafe says, ‘I did not mean Lambert. He brought it on himself.’

  ‘I believe Gardiner brought it on him.’ He is angry. ‘He sets his claws back on English soil and this occurs. I think he has been to the king behind my back. I think he has been pulling at his sleeve – telling him how the French are disgusted at our reformation, how the Emperor is appalled – how he must prove himself a good Roman at heart. As if his great cause is some silly quarrel that can be patched within a fortnight, and seven years’ work dismissed –’

  ‘It is too late now for a speech,’ Rafe says.

  His household guard is here, ready to take him home. The crowds are dispersing. The fanfares are done, the trumpeters are strolling away. He calls them over, reaches in his pocket to give them some drinking money. They touch their caps to him. He turns back to Rafe. ‘I hope it does not seem I disdained the king’s efforts. I did not. He reasoned very well.’

  Rafe says, ‘It appeared that you did not know what to do.’

  He thinks, I did know. But I didn’t do it. I could have given my voice for Lambert. Or at least walked out.

  ‘Barnes played the hypocrite,’ he says. ‘But for the grace of God he would be standing there himself, accused.’

  Rafe says, ‘Rob has done himself no harm today.’

  Rafe leaves the rest unsaid. They go out into the cold. He thinks, I could have quoted, I could have cited. What has all my reading been for?

  He puts his arm across Rafe’s shoulders. Rafe never fleshes; he is no hunter nor tennis-player, he is meagre as a boy, breakable. ‘Never fear,’ he says. ‘We shall prosper, son.’ The cold stings their faces.

  It is not many days till the burning. He sends to Lambert food and drink, words of consolation and pity, but he asks himself, how can these be received? He knows I did not speak for him. I sat in the cockpit among those eager hard-eyed men, with the taste of blood in their mouths, and I did not lift a finger. Or raise my voice, except to read the sentence. But if the king would not consult me, what could I do? In all of The Book Called Henry, there is no precedent for it.

  John Lambert’s end is a grand occasion. At Smithfield there are stands for the dignitaries, hung with the emblems of England, furnished with plush cushions. Every councillor is on parade, who is not actually sick in bed: each man hung with his chains of office, and the Garter badge for the elite. Seats with the best view are reserved for the principal ambassadors, for Castillon and Chapuys.

  The day is a fiesta of pain. He has never seen a man suffer so. A spectator cannot make his eyes blind. He can only close them for moments together. He thinks, thank God that Gregory is safe down in Sussex. He could not look when Anne Boleyn died, and that was but a heartbeat: less.

  Lambert is an hour dying. At his side, attending my lord Privy Seal, is a small boy, Thomas Cromwell, alias Harry Smith. There is a smear of ash on his bare arm; his body, beneath his jerkin, is cloudy with bruises.

  In the starlit hour, Cranmer comes to see him. A pastoral visit. ‘You are not well?’

  He will not admit to that. ‘Awake at all hours,’ he says. ‘It is Master Traitor Pole, he makes so much paperwork with his machinations.’

  The archbishop looks helpless himself, exhausted. He, Lord Cromwell, calls for wine for him, for food if he will take it: a capon’s wing, plums. Cranmer shuffles in his chair. He blows his nose. He says, ‘You know, what we have begun will not come to fruition in one generation. You are past fifty. And I, not much less.’

  ‘Gardiner asked if I thought we were living in the last days.’

  Cranmer darts a glance at him. ‘But you do not. Surely.’ The archbishop is biting his lip, like a man lifting a splinter with a needle.

  ‘I can see why good men want to believe that Christ is coming. We want His justice, when justice seems so long delayed.’

  ‘You think Lambert did not have justice?’

  He looks up. It is not a trap.

  He says, ‘You can’t pick and choose, if you serve a prince, week to week or cause to cause. Sometimes all you can do is lessen the damage. But here we failed.’

  Cranmer says, ‘We must not make Thomas More’s mistake. He thought Henry’s conscience was his to command.’

  The door opens. Cranmer starts. ‘Ah, Christophe –’

  Christophe puts down a platter. ‘I think my master ought to have a holiday.’

  ‘Beyond my remit,’ Cranmer says faintly. ‘You know, when I was a boy I did suppose an archbishop could do anything. I supposed he could do miracles.’

  ‘I never gave it a thought,’ he says. ‘Christophe, bring fruit.’

  The boy trundles out. He says, ‘The light of Christ leads us to some murky places.’
>
  The archbishop is looking at his roast fowl. He says, ‘I cannot touch flesh. Not this evening.’

  He says, ‘Have you ever seen a hawk keep killing, when the prey is dead?’

  Cranmer flinches. ‘No,’ he says, ‘no. I think the king was … he surprised me … he was judicious, he was, at times, he was almost … fatherly.’

  Ripping and stamping, rage in the eye. Sipping blood from the body cavity, then slashing again at the flesh.

  ‘Fatherly,’ he says. ‘Yes, he was.’

  He thinks, after I saw Joan Boughton burned, I went home to my little life and I did not know if it was true or if I had dreamed it. I wondered if I might see her in the street, an elderly body about her business, going with her basket to buy cloves and apples for a pie.

  Cranmer says, ‘But what else could we have done? Lambert chose his answers. It lay within his power to make others.’

  ‘I do not think it did.’

  Cranmer considers that. To fill the silence he asks him, ‘How is your lady?’

  ‘Grete?’ Cranmer speaks as if he had other wives, one or two. ‘Grete is afraid. And tired of hiding. I assured her when I brought her to England that the king would be brought to a different opinion, and that we would be able to live freely like any couple. But as it is …’

  His voice dies away. We are living on borrowed time, in small rooms, a bag always packed, an ear always alert; we sleep lightly and some nights hardly at all.

  He says to Cranmer, ‘So what now? After this? If the king can burn this man he can burn us. What shall I do?’

  ‘Maintain your rule as long as you can. For the gospel’s sake I shall do the same.’

  ‘What use is our rule, if we could not save John Lambert?’

  ‘We could not save John Frith. Yet look at all we have been able to do, since Frith went into the fire. We could not save Tyndale, but we could save his book.’

  True. Dead men are at work. Their cause is not lost. They labour on, screened from us by smoke.

  When Cranmer has gone his household supply him with candles and wine and draw his door closed. They subdue their voices and walk as if wearing felt slippers. He takes a fresh sheet of paper and begins to write a letter. To my very loving friend Sir Thomas Wyatt, knight, the king’s ambassador with the Emperor.

  He writes, The king’s Majesty, my lord prince’s grace, my ladies his daughters, and the rest of his council be all merry and in good prosperity …

  When I was a young man, he thinks, I needed all my strength. Pity was a luxury I might one day afford, like fine white bread or a book; a sound roof over my head, a light of amber or blue glass, a ring for my finger; an ell of pearled brocade, a lute, a beechwood fire; a safe hand to light it.

  The xvith day of this present …

  Origen says for each man God makes a scroll, which is rolled and hidden in the heart. God inscribes with a quill, a reed, a bone.

  … the king’s Majesty, for the reverence of the holy sacrament of the altar …

  He thinks of adding, our monarch wore white. Head to toe he shone. Like a mirror. Like a light. He writes, I wish the princes of Europe could have seen it, heard it – with what gravity he strove for the conversion of this poor miserable wretch …

  His hand moves across the paper, the ink unites with its weave. The firelight stirs, a candle flame bows and blurs. He remembers riding with Gregory across the downs, under a silver sky: the light without shadow, like the light at the beginning of the world.

  If those princes had been with me today, he writes, they would have seen Henry’s learning and marvelled at it. They would have witnessed his judgement, his policy: they would have seen him as – he lifts his pen for an instant from the page – the mirror and light of all other kings and princes in Christendom.

  Among his papers he still has a verse from Tom Truth’s pen. It has become loose from its poem, but he has it by heart.

  But since my fancy leads her so

  And leads my friendship from the light

  And walketh me darkling to and fro

  While other friends may walk in sight …

  Even the worst poets, from time to time, hit on a felicitous phrasing. You can see the flicker, as the human form passes from light to dark and back again. He looks around the room. The subdued glow of the turkey carpet. His books bound in kidskin and calf. The silver plate, reflecting himself to himself: the mirror and light of all councillors that are in Christendom.

  He puts down his pen. He thinks, this letter will not do, tomorrow I will fill in the gaps; or perhaps not, tomorrow they want me at the Tower. He is too tired, too shaken, too riven by horror and desolation to describe in any detail the judgement of Lambert, let alone his last day. He writes, I doubt not some of your friends who have leisure shall by their letters advertise you of the whole discourse …

  Let them. He closes his eyes. What does God see? Cromwell in the fifty-fourth year of his age, in all his weight and gravitas, his bulk wrapped in wool and fur? Or a mere flicker, an illusion, a spark beneath a shoe, a spit in the ocean, a feather in a desert, a wisp, a phantom, a needle in a haystack? If Henry is the mirror, he is the pale actor who sheds no lustre of his own, but spins in a reflected light. If the light moves he is gone.

  When I was in Italy, he thinks, I saw Virgins painted on every wall, I saw in every fresco the sponged blood-colour of Christ’s robe. I saw the sinuous tempter that winds from a branch, and Adam’s face as he was tempted. I saw that the serpent was a woman, and about her face were curls of silver-gilt; I saw her writhe about the green bough, saw it sway under her coils. I saw the lamentation of Heaven over Christ crucified, angels flying and crying at the same time. I saw torturers nimble as dancers hurling stones at St Stephen, and I saw the martyr’s bored face as he waited for death. I saw a dead child cast in bronze, standing over its own corpse: and all these pictures, images, I took into myself, as some kind of prophecy or sign. But I have known men and women, better than me and closer to grace, who have meditated on every splinter of the cross, till they forget who and what they are, and observe the Saviour’s blood, running in the soaked fibres of the wood. Till they believe themselves no longer captive to misfortune nor crime, nor in thrall to a useless sacrifice in an alien land. Till they see Christ’s cross is the tree of life, and the truth breaks inside them, and they are saved.

  He sands his paper. Puts down his pen. I believe, but I do not believe enough. I said to Lambert, my prayers are with you, but in the end I only prayed for myself, that I might not suffer the same death.

  III

  Inheritance

  December 1538

  His scheme of registration is badly taken. Recording baptisms, the people say, will enable the king to tax us in our infancy. Recording weddings will allow him to impose a levy on every bride and groom. Given notice of funerals, Cromwell’s commissioners will attend to pluck the pennies off the corpse’s lids.

  Cromwell is laying his plans, they say, to steal our firewood, our chickens and our spoons. He means to impound our millstone, tax cauldrons and stewpots, weight the beam, tamper with the baker’s scales, and fix liquid measures in his favour. The man is like a weasel, who eats his own weight every day. You do not see him coming, he makes himself so small he can pass through a wedding ring. His eyes are open all night. He dances to baffle his prey then sucks out their brains. His lair is in the dens of the vanquished and he lines it with their fur.

  Ambassador Chapuys seeks an interview. He is agitated. ‘Thomas, do you know what they are saying in Rome? They say that when you broke Becket’s shrine you took his bones and shot them out of a cannon. Surely it cannot be true?’

  ‘Ambassador, if only I had thought of it …’

  Chapuys says, ‘You are lucky you do not serve that King Henry who had Becket murdered. The chronicles state he would roll on the floor in his rages, and foam at the mo
uth like a mad dog.’

  At Lambeth Palace they had a statue of Becket perched in the outer wall, looking over the river. Now Cranmer has taken it down and the place is empty. His bargemaster says, ‘I’ve been saluting that knave since I was a boy.’

  ‘Time you stopped then, Bastings.’

  ‘My father before me. His father before him. I expect habit will keep me to it.’

  Bastings spits over the side. In the days when he was a little lad at Putney, he used to think boatmen spat for luck. But his uncle John told him that they do it to alert their gods, who look up through the tides at the underside of vessels, and see the leaks not yet sprung.

  When he was fourteen he thought all the time about the river. When it rained he thought, good, more water, carrying me away to the sea.

  The Thames is swollen; it is the kind of weather that washes the corpses out of St Olave’s churchyard, and sends them swimming on a frothy tide. Safely home, he unlocks the box where he keeps his dead wife’s prayer book. He locates the image of Becket and cuts out the page. He does it delicately, with a thin-bladed knife. He turns over the pages and looks at each picture. He sees Mary dead and carried in procession, with the Jews darting out to shake the bier and trample underfoot the rose-garlands of the mourners. He sees Christ scourged at the pillar, His white fish body writhing from the flail.

  At Austin Friars the strongrooms and cellars are filling with relics. There is a stack of handkerchiefs neatly hemmed by the Blessed Virgin and a piece of the rope with which Judas hanged himself. Madonnas have been through by the half-dozen, some on their way to be burned, others axed; our Lady of Caversham nudges St Ann of Buxton, St Modwen giggles in their train. It reminds him of the days before Anne Boleyn came down, when the ladies clustered together, sliding dangerous thoughts through painted lips, and rolling their painted eyes. In a box there is a livid two-inch piece of gristle, which is the ear of Malchus, servant to Israel’s high priest – cut off by St Peter at the time of our Saviour’s arrest. Becket’s bones lie in their plain box. Only a clever surgeon, and possibly not even he, could tell you whether they are the bones of a martyr or of an animal.